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SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE

Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith

Mummer Love

A sonic cross-continental experience, ‘Mummer Love’ is the second album in the ‘Perfect Vision’ triptych collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith.

For this body of work, Soundwalk Collective journeyed to Africa to explore the intricacies of Arthur Rimbaud’s most obscure period. After leaving France and what he deemed the ‘Western stagnation’, Rimbaud found himself in Harar, Ethiopia - an epicentre of Sufism in Africa. Sufi practise focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, the purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. A strand within the wider Islam religion, it focuses on spirituality, meditation and chanting sessions.

As with the other albums in the triptych, the Collective searched for hidden, earthy sounds that hold memories and embed existence. For ‘Mummer Love’ they also found themselves recording under the tree where Rimbaud photographed the shrine of Sheik Abadir Umar ar- Rida al Harari, the founder of the holy city Harar. “As the rain fell, I wondered if I was hearing the drops hitting the leaves the same way Rimbaud did 140 years ago,” Stephan Crasneanscki from Soundwalk Collective says. These sounds and Sufi chants are juxtaposed with Patti Smith’s poems, like the title track ‘Mummer Love’. Written to Rimbaud, Smith’s words are rooted in multiple aspects of the self: from the passion of a lover to the care of a mother and everything in between.

Further contributions to the album come from Mulatu Astatke (widely considered the father of Ethio-jazz) and Phillip Glass, who has long felt a connection to Sufi music, coming together and evoking a call and response between piano and vocals of the Sufi masters. It is simultaneously the first time Glass collaborates with Smith and so Harar becomes an extraordinary meeting place for all to celebrate the beauty of Rimbaud’s work.

‘Mummer Love’ is released around the anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud (10th November 1891).

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: The collaboration of dreams – Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith. Compelling instrumentals and sound recordings joined with Patti Smith’s poetic spoken word makes it work so well. Taking inspiration from Ethiopia, using Sufi music takes it to a whole new level.

TRACK LISTING

Aw Abadir
La Maison De Rimbaud
Eternity
Song Of The Highest Tower
Mummer Love
Farewell
Bad Blood
Sensation

Soundwalk Collective Feat. Patti Smith

The Peyote Dance

    The Peyote Dance’ is the first in a triptych of albums to be released by Bella Union over the next year titled ‘The Perfect Vision’, which take their inspiration from the writings of three emblematic French poets: Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud and René Daumal and their necessity to travel to different lands to acquire a new vision and perspective on themselves and artworks. Perhaps a perfect vision, it is one that allowed them to transcend forms and borders, both physical and mental. 

    Recorded in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico, Abyssinian valley of Ethiopia and Himalayan Summit of India respectively, the central idea is that each landscape holds sleeping memories that are the witness of human passage. Each album retraces the poets’ footsteps, channelled through on-location recorded soundscapes and musicalities, with Patti Smith revisiting the words that have been inspired by the landscapes.

    The triptych marks a new chapter in the collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, who first worked together on ‘Killer Road’ in 2016.

    ‘The Peyote Dance’ focuses on a brief part of Artaud’s life, when he travelled to Mexico City in early 1936 to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Mexico on topics including Surrealism, Marxism and theatre. In the summer, he travelled by train towards the Chihuahua region and by horse to the Tarahumara mountains with the help of a mestizo guide, which the album’s opening track, recited by Gael Garcia Bernal, evokes. Artaud was drawn to the story of the Rarámuri: Native Indian people who live in the Norogachi region of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, the Sierra Tarahumara. One of Artaud’s goals was to find a peyote shaman who could heal him; allowing him to recover from an opioid addiction.

    During his stay, encountering the Rarámuri Indians and peyote shamans of Tarahumara and engaging in ceremonies, Artaud had a transcendental experience which resulted in the book ‘The Peyote Dance’. For the eponymous album, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith revisited writings from the book and other texts written after Artaud’s return to France, where he remained in a mental asylum in Rodez undergoing electric shock therapy. During this dark period, the encounter with the Rarámuri stayed with him as his last significant, happy experience. The final track on the album is a poem written by Patti Smith in homage to Artaud’s last hours in Ivry.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Una Nota Sobre El Peyote
    2. Indian Culture
    3. Tutuguri: The Rite Of The Black Sun
    4. Tutuguri: The Rite Of Black Night
    5. The New Revelations Of Being
    6. Alienation And Black Magic
    7. Ivry
    8. Basalówala Aminá Ralámuli Paísila

    Soundwalk Collective is an experimental sound collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki in New York City (2000 – present), and joined by Simone Merli in 2008. Following the participation of Dug Winningham and Kamran Sadeghi throughout the years, the Collective currently operates in a continuously rotating constellation of sound artists and musicians.

    Their approach to composition combines anthropology, ethnography, non-linear narrative, psycho-geography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis. The source material of their works is always linked to specific locations, natural or artificial, and requires long periods of investigative travel and field work.

    Distinguished collaborators include American singer, songwriter and poet Patti Smith, Ethiopian Jazz musician Mulatu Astatke, American photographer Nan Goldin and French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard. The Collective have also written original scores for contemporary dance choreographer Sasha Waltz.

    Their recent projects include a collaboration with Patti Smith and reworking the archive of recordings on Jean-Luc Godard's film set. For the 8th Marionette publication, Soundwalk Collective present 'Death Must Die'. A sound piece that began in 2004 and ended up as a composition for the PS1 radio in NY. For this New release the Collective has revisited the piece in a more musical way.

    'Death Must Die' is based on Stephan Crasneanscki’s multiple visits to the sacred Indian city of Varanasi, originally known as Kashi and Banares. Sacred texts maintain that Varanasi isn’t even a city, but rather a lingam of celestial light, the subtle and cosmic form of Lord Shiva which manifested itself as a city for the sake of seekers of liberation. To bathe in the holy Ganga is to be purified of your sins. To die in Varanasi, is to attain liberation and to bring an end to the cycle of rebirth known as transmigration. Determined to capture the elusive reality of this ancient city, Stephan has day by day recorded and re-imagined his understanding of how to perceive the continuously moving stream of the holy Ganga; performing a simple form of sadhana, which request is to be very alert but also to allow your mind to be quiet, making it easier to slip into the streams, and into the current that both the city and the river are offering.

    ‘Death Must Die' begins before the rising of the sun and reproduces the cycle of a day in Varanasi, going down the river that is believed to be the divinity descended to this Earth in the form of water. She grants us happiness and salvation. The composition attempts to emulate the vibration of Kashi that encourages the kind of interiority that enables a person to get a better perspective on reality than one might have, while constantly being in the current of human life. A vibration dedicated to eliminating the distinction between human and non-human, between alive and dead, between light and dark.

    TRACK LISTING

    01. Kingdom Of Kashi
    02. Object Of Human Pursuit
    03. Garden Of Deeds
    04. Tandav
    05. Agni
    06. Hymn Of Creation
    07. Shiva Mother Ganges


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